Sad Men

Comedy comes of age on TNT.

Braugher, Romano, and Bakula chew the fat in “Men of a Certain Age.”Credit Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

It’s not the best time to be a middle-aged man in this country, but it’s not a bad time for television shows about middle-aged men. This week, comedy comes to TNT, in the form of “Men of a Certain Age,” an hour-long serious comedy, without a laugh track and with a more relaxed pace than the bullet-train setups and punch lines of conventional sitcoms. For women of a certain age, on the other hand, the glaring awfulness of “Cougar Town” stands out as this year’s undeserved slap in the face, though perhaps there’s some rough justice to seeing a forty-year-old mother as a tornado of insecurity and sexual mania—not that Courteney Cox has any believability in the role—after all the years that men have been portrayed as lunks, idiots, and TV-watching duds. (Who even knows if “Cougar Town” has a laugh track or a soundtrack? If it’s there, it’s drowned out by the show’s humiliation track.) This season, ABC has a great show about men (and women) who are getting up there, “Modern Family,” and a not entirely insulting one, “The Middle,” and it has already cleared away some junk—the deadly sitcom “Hank,” starring the ever more unwatchably brittle Kelsey Grammer. In general, the creative talents working in television comedy have been trying to push upward through the pavement of convention in order to grow. The touchstone for this movement—at least, on network television—was the one-camera, no-laugh-track comedy “Arrested Development,” which débuted on Fox half a dozen years ago. That series, about a family that was living on the fumes of its delusions in an unfinished California housing development, was farcical and deadpan at the same time—all the characters, even the teen-agers, had a touch of middle-aged craziness. “Arrested Development” busted open the family sitcom, and just as important as what it achieved on that level was its fate in the world. Fox made the bold decision to equate “good show” with “worth renewing,” and brought it back for a second season, despite its poor ratings. The series wasn’t brilliant to the end (it lasted three seasons; two would have been fine), but that act of support inspired hope in both viewers and TV writers. (Now we’re practically spoiled, as another treasured show, NBC’s “Friday Night Lights,” keeps not getting cancelled.)

“Men of a Certain Age” is bound to attract attention, because its co-creator, and one of its co-stars, is Ray Romano; what shouldn’t be overlooked, however, is the fact that the show is also good. Surprisingly good, you might think, especially if, like me, you were put off by the character that Romano played in his long-running (1996-2005) sitcom, “Everybody Loves Raymond”—a schlubby, whiny husband whose hallmarks were reluctance and inattention. He was a pull toy for Patricia Heaton’s brisk, demanding wife. The theme song for “Men of a Certain Age,” a cover version of the Beach Boys’ “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man),” plays over a montage of old home movies of little boys doing classic little-boy things and going through rites of passage: bicycling, running under the sprinkler, wearing superhero capes, teasing girls, throwing mortarboards in the air. The sequence makes you wonder whether the series’ creators—Romano’s co-creator is Mike Royce, a longtime writer and producer of “Raymond”—will go further than a checklist of boomer nostalgia. They do. As you get to know the characters better with each episode, the credit sequence becomes increasingly touching, underscoring the gifts that come with an American childhood and the true pains of adulthood. The last shot is of a boy throwing a balsa-wood airplane up into the air, and the joy and momentum—the sense of aliveness—expressed in the thrust of his arm as it launches the plane are almost heartbreaking.

The obvious sitcom take on the image would be that although you can still throw a plane at fifty—the age that the characters in “Men of a Certain Age” are pushing—you may tear your rotator cuff. But the show offers more perspective than that. It’s almost as though it had a narrator telling you, in a voice-over from the future, what the characters are going through, as in “The Wonder Years” and the movie “Stand By Me.” Romano plays Joe, one of three former college friends in Los Angeles who still hang out together. He’s separated from his wife, Sonia (Penelope Ann Miller), and living in a hotel room; the highlight of his morning routine is guessing the temperature before the automated voice of his wakeup call announces it. Andre Braugher is another of the friends, Owen, a father of three young children, whose morning starts with one of his kids dressed in a Hulk costume shooting foam balls at him and telling him, “Mommy said to get up ’cause you gotta go exercise.” Scott Bakula is the hunky Terry, an unmarried and underemployed actor, whose active sex life calls forth envy and disapproval from his friends. When the three men head out of the city for a day hike, in the first episode, Joe hits a possum in the road and is torn about what to do. He can’t tell whether it’s dead or alive, and he decides that the only humane solution is to make sure it’s dead, so he backs up over it, then pulls ahead again. It becomes clear that the possum is definitely not dead, as they look back and see it walking across the road. Of the three guys in the car, Joe is the most upset by this mess; at first, he thought he might have killed the animal, then he tried to kill the animal, and now he’s left wondering whether it will die because of him. It’s to the show’s credit that this isn’t (only) a metaphor for the uncertainty and the inevitable mistakes of adult life; the scene is viscerally disturbing, and you watch it closely, as if some magical method for undoing irreversible damage will reveal itself, not just to Joe but to you, too. The conversation among the men encompasses all that questioning and agonizing, without your feeling too heavily the creators’ own middle-aged hands (Romano is a couple of weeks shy of fifty-two; the dewier Royce is in the middle of his journey between forty and fifty). There’s real imagination at work.

The show cuts between short scenes of each man in his unique environment: Joe, who has two teen-age kids, arranging things with his wife, or taking care of his business, a party-supply store (Joe’s Party Depot, it’s called, and though you’d never think of Joe as promoting festiveness as such, he still likes fun things, like balloons); Terry at his office-temp job, which isn’t really all that temp, alas, or going on an open call for a lame part in a lame show; and Owen struggling at the car dealership owned by his father, Owen, Sr. (Richard Gant), a mean bastard who thinks he’s upholding family values when all he’s really doing is crushing his son’s spirit. (Oddly, “Men of a Certain Age” doesn’t touch on the crumbling of the automobile industry, at least not in the first few episodes.) Then we linger with the men awhile as they get together at a coffee shop to shoot the breeze. (Yes, the movie “Diner” comes to mind; Barry Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together at a coffee shop.) In one episode, Terry says that he doesn’t like the idea of sales, because you never get anywhere; it’s Sisyphean, he says—a word that the other two give him some grief for. Owen says that the goal is someday being the boss. Joe, who is his own boss, says that it’s good to be the boss, but it changes things: “You’re still you. Sometimes you’re like, Who are you? All right, I’m the boss. But who are you? Looking in the mirror . . . you recognize yourself, but there’s that little bit of you that you don’t.” Owen, his mouth full of hamburger, puts an end to Joe’s ruminations: “This is that possum shit.” Joe already has old-man worries; he can’t read the small print on the ketchup bottle anymore, and says, “What if it’s medication one day?” Of course, what’s funny about this is that one day it will be a medication label that he has trouble reading.

Some elements of “Men of a Certain Age” are off: not for a second do you believe that Braugher’s character would still be working for his father, and it’s too bad that the creators succumbed to the urge to end the first episode with the self-seriously sad song “Reflections of My Life.” But there’s some real darkness to the show, and, despite the “Reflections” gaffe, “Men of a Certain Age” doesn’t wallow in its own melancholy, though it could: Joe has a gambling problem, Owen has diabetes, and Terry is beginning to feel hollow without a family. One night, outside his store, Joe looks up at a big promotional balloon figure with a smiling face. It’s just a balloon, but with the wind whipping it around in the light of the parking lot it looks threatening. What “Men of a Certain Age” illustrates is that when you reach that certain age life gets scary all over again. ♦